Things I teach at the University of Westminster

02/17/2012

We talked a bit in the lecture last week about data journalism, when Tom Hannen showed us his inforgraphic work for the BBC. I thought we'd look at it a bit more today. Datajournalism has a bit of a hot topic in online journalism circles for the last couple of years with lots of developers and journalists experimenting with different ways to find stories in data.

A debate has been going on for a few years now, linked to the growing availability of data online, one that suggests that journalists need to be more than storytellers now, that they need to know how to work with data in different ways. A couple of years agi, the new media pundit Jeff Jarvis asked the question, 'Is Journalism Storytelling?' Adrian Monck tackled the same area around the same time, arguing that the future of journalism was maths, or rather 'presenting mathematised knowledge'. The story is now redundant, he suggests...

These are rather extreme positions - perhaps what Wikileaks shows is that data on its own isn't enough - that to reach a larger audience there needs to be some sort of story there, or narrative frame... Martin Moore has a good introduction to current thinking about the field - he argues that data journalism is about coping with information abundance and that it means lots of different things - it's not just about database programming.

One thing you can do online is find new ways to present data... There's a growing interest in data visualisation, in mixing data, maps, charts and text to explore and communicate ideas and issues...If we get a chance, we'll talk about this, I hope.

We'll have a look at David McCandless' work in this area - his site has lots of great information and some brilliant interactives you can can play with (e.g Snake Oil?). We'll also look at his TED lecture.

Nieman Storyboard on Cutthroat Capitalism - a ground-breaking piece of investigative journalism by Scott Carney, done as a series of graphic/visualisations and then turned into game online. The piece ran in the magazine last year and is still online. Carney talks about how he did the story on his blog - it was a lot of work.

Perhaps the best way to learn how to live blog (and to learn what you can do and what kinds of things you can write) is to look at some real life examples. A good place to start is the The Guardian's Minute by Minutes page, which showcases all the live blogs they have running at any one time. Have a read of some of their liveblogs and think about the types of post they feature, the different media and news inputs a journalist uses as they live blog and how they can prepare, as writers, for this kind of job.

Today we're going to look at how to use maps in your online journalism. Sometimes this is about telling a story in a new way. Sometimes it's about infographics - about getting across information in a clear and engaging way. We're going to look at various examples of online maps and then you're going to work on creating a few Google Maps.

Some of these examples are a bit old now. But they show you some of the things people tried as the ideas of using maps in stories online developed. Now map-based stories are very complex - they blur with timelines and infographics in general and involve some serious programming and Flash animation. Reza will show you a bit of this in class today. You can also find state of the art map stories via the Maps Mania blog mentioned above.

02/10/2012

I mentioned this in the morning workshop today - I use Instapaper to save articles for reading later. At the moment, I'm mostly saving stuff that's relevant to the work you're doing on this module. I do bookmark some of the pieces I on Delicious eventually. But another way you could get access to the pieces I'm reading is by subsribing to the RSS feed for my Instapaper Unread folder. I'm not completely sure this will work. But here's the link:

http://www.instapaper.com/rss/706847/CCG66Bk2giXLqXEFCwgIcmM91Rc

You could try copying that and then pasting it into the Subscribe box on Google Reader. Let me know if it works (or doesn't).

One thing we're going to look at today is audio slideshows. Some of you may end up doing slideshows for your individual projects on this module. Slideshows are everywhere online these days. The audio slideshow, in particular, is a really interesting storytelling form, one that seems native to the web in some way.

It's pretty easy to put a few pics together and call it a slideshow. It's harder to do something where the images and audio work together to really explore a journalistic idea or story.

We're going to talk a bit about today about how to do them well. Reza will take you through some of the technical side of things too. And we'll try to put together some very simple audio slideshows.

Another example from last year in The Guardian - To Obama, with love from... This has no sound but uses captions to create a kind of list feature.

The Atlantic has a really good example of kind of slideshow journalism - Twitter from @A to @Z - there's no audio here but it shows how to combine slideshows with a story. It followed it up with more of the same - Twitter from @0 to @9.

02/06/2012

One research site we might look at today is Delicious - it's a social bookmarking tool - which means it allows you to store bookmarks online and then share those bookmarks with other Delicious users...

The site has recently be revamped by its new owners - the guys who started YouTube. They bought Delicious from Yahoo around a year ago. Before that it had been left to languish a bit. The new owners have added new social features and made the site a bit more visual. There are lots of other sites around that do similar things - for example, Diigo and Pinboard. It's worth playing around with them and seeing which one works best for you.

Today we'll talk a bit about how best to use social bookmarking tools as part of your approach to research online.

The net makes it really easy to find and consume a wide range of media. I'm not just talking about pure news here. You can read a vast amount of cultural analysis/journalism, comment, opinion, reviews and more online.

But, obviously, you already know that. However, are you really taking advantage of all the information that's out there?

One of the key skills you need to develop as journalists (whatever medium you work in) is media literacy and news sense. Whatever your interest (music, sport, fashion), you need to read widely and really get a sense of what's going on in your field, what stories are being covered by who and why.

Here are a couple of tools that will help you broaden the range of media you consume:

RSS Feeds You can use special news reader programs to subscribe to news feeds. It's a good way of scanning a lot of news/information in one go. You can also use web-based services to do something similar. We'll try out Google Reader as an easy way into using feeds.

News AggregatorsGoogle News is the best known of these sorts of sites. It automatically gathers news stories from sources all over the world and organises them according to various categories. News aggregators can give you access to a wide variety of perspectives on big news stories (but not always - we'll talk about this in class). There are various other new aggregators that build on what Google News does - for example, Silobreaker and Newser. NewsMap is an interesting attempt to visualise the flow of stories on Google News

We're going to do a couple of things today.

I'd like you to set up Google Reader and subscribe to a few news feeds. Over the next week, I'd like you to use the service to track stories in a field/subject/area that interests you.

Also, I'd like you to personalise Google News. Set it up to track news stories you're interested in and use it over the next week or so. Next week, we''ll talk about how useful you found each service.

You're probably already brilliant at finding stuff (and people) online. But so I can find out what you know, let's try a quick research exercise. Here's a quick brief.

Imagine you've been asked by the editor of The Guardian to write a feature piece on old people and the net. It's going to go in the technology pages. You need to deliver tomorrow - they need 1500 words. Someone's let them down and they have space that needs filling quickly.

First of all, you need to decide what you need for a piece of this length. Next - can you find what you need online? Then you need to find it.

The assessment task for this bit of the Essential Journalism module is to work together in groups to create a small blogzine and run it live for a week.

Today, to get you started on thinking about this, we're going to look at some of the commercial blogs and blog networks out there, to give you some idea of the kinds of things you could do. Here's a few links to look at: